Looking Back: A Record Year

It’s only been two years since ThoughtSpot launched, and we’ve come a long way. We’re well on our way to achieving our vision of reaching 20 million users by 2020, and this past year we really put our foot on the gas to make that happen.

Today we announced some pretty amazing year end results for our fiscal year ending January 31, 2017. We grew our global customer base by 270%, and are now powering over 3 million ad hoc searches saving an estimated 5 million hours of data analyst time and $250 million in labor costs. We raised $60 million in new funding, expanded our executive team, and received some pretty amazing industry awards. It’s always fun to take a step back and look at everything that happens in a year.

The BI Industry is Craving Innovation

Across the entire BI industry, we saw legacy vendors lose ground as customers continue to shift their technology budgets toward new modern BI platforms designed to make analytics easier for business people—not just IT data experts. Just last week, Gartner predicted the BI market will grow by 7.3% to $18.3B in 2017. Gartner says data and analytics are now mainstream, and people are hungry for agile BI solutions that incorporate search interfaces and smart data discovery.

With our Relational Search technology, we’re working hard to address this gap in the market, providing a BI solution that makes it easier for non-technical business people to use search to analyze their company data in seconds.

Search is on the Map

Over the past year, we’ve seen the analytics market being disrupted by smart search-driven interfaces. A trend Gartner sees accelerating by 2020, when, “50% of analytic queries will be generated using search, natural-language processing or voice, or will be autogenerated.”

And we are humbled to have been recognized over the past year as a leader in this movement. In May we were excited to be named a 2016 Cool Vendor in Analytics. Receiving this kind of attention so early on in our journey was, well, really cool. It gave us validation that we’re on the right track in terms of driving innovation in the BI and analytics space.

Accelerating Adoption Across the Enterprise

To build on this momentum, and continue to bring relational search to the masses, last year we announced Series C funding from top venture capital firms General Catalyst, Geodesic Capital, and Hewlett Packard Pathfinder—growing total investment in the company to $100M. We joined HP’s Partnership program and formed a strategic partnership with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).

We also grew the ThoughtSpot team. We opened a new office in Seattle, Washington, and continued to bring on new team members in our Palo Alto and London offices. We welcomed Brian Blond as our Chief Revenue Officer, Tom Weeks as Chief Customer Officer, Davy Nys as GM of EMEA, and Marc Odenweller as VP Global Channels.

Looking Forward

As we take stock of such an incredible year, we know we still have a lot of work to do to reach our goal of 20 million users by 2020. We still see huge opportunities to help shape what next generation BI platforms should offer. We’re building the world’s most advanced, yet easy-to-use number-crunching machine with a singular mission—to deliver access to data and insights at "human scale." And we can’t wait to see what 2017 has in store for us!